The law of attraction: garbled fragment of a lost tradition

There is no way to state the law of attraction with finality, because thousands of people have tinkered with it, and some of them earnestly believe they have the only “true” version.

I’ll present several of the more popular descriptions first, and then comment.

“The law of attraction is the name given to the maxim ‘like attracts like’ which in New Thought philosophy is used to sum up the idea that by focusing on positive or negative thoughts a person brings positive or negative experiences into their life…” (Wikipedia)

“The Law of Attraction is no scary science or heavy philosophy – it is all about turning good intentions into positive action. It really is as simple as that. Simple exercises like filling your thoughts, words and energies with positivity and possibility, knowing exactly what it is that you want and then simply ‘allowing’ the universe to flow.” (thelawofattraction.com)

“Someone has said, ‘the Universe has imagined it even better than you have.’ And we like to add to that: The Universe got all of its information about what you like from you, and it has remembered every piece of it and has put it together in perfect formation. And so, the things that are on their way to you are so much better than you even know that you want. And as you allow them, the essence all of these things that the Universe knows that you are wanting make their way to you and appear in perfect timing for you.” (abraham-hicks.com)

The first thing to notice about these formulations is that they have a major passive component. You’re just there, thinking good thoughts, and the universe delivers its gifts to you. Hello! Incoming! And the second thing to notice is how the universe itself is characterized. It isn’t planets, stars, and galaxies. It’s a mystic “everything” that is paying close attention to you. It’s an outside force that is ready and willing to pass along positive results in exchange for positive thoughts.

It’s no surprise that the law of attraction has flourished in modern America. The law, in its own strange way, is a marvel of optimism. “No need to worry, all you need to do is accentuate the positive in your thoughts, and good things will descend upon you.”

There is even a more “sophisticated” version of the law, whereby, if you think-positive and don’t receive what you want, you didn’t really want it. That is, your higher self didn’t want it. Therefore, disappointment and failure aren’t possible.

The law is also an expression of a severely declining culture, in which large numbers of people, living in a superficial land of plenty, just can’t seem to be happy. They’re not getting what they want. The presents under the Xmas tree aren’t the right presents. The dreams they’re dreaming aren’t coming true. Therefore: build a better Santa Claus. Call him Universe.

The law of attraction also has a dark side: don’t entertain negative thoughts or negative things will happen to you. This may as well be an overt piece of mind control, because…who can avoid a trickle or a stream of negative thoughts? The individual is being set up. “Be a cop. Monitor yourself. Be your own Surveillance State. Keep those negative thoughts away. Don’t think of a pink elephant driving a truck on the sidewalk as you step out a café…”

The law of attraction: it’s as if someone read an ancient torn manuscript, tried to reconstruct a valuable piece of information, and missed the mark by a few miles. He got it all wrong. He got it backwards. Everything he could get wrong he did get wrong.

Why do I say that?

First of all, re the law of attraction, we’re talking about “positive and negative thought” at a level of power that is weak, weak, weak. We’re talking about an inconsequential level of thinking. We’re also talking about thought that is divorced from action. The individual is characterized as if he were a radio antenna, a receiving apparatus. Thoughts are coming in, good ones and bad ones. His job is to filter out the bad ones and strive to accentuate the good ones. This is preposterous. This is a losing proposition.

In ancient Tibet, before the priest class took over and established a theocracy, the practitioners of the art of manifestation were operating at a truly profound level of creation. If someone had come up with the law of attraction, he would have been encouraged to see it and invent it with all the sustained intensity he possibly could—and then, when he had it before him with alive and electric force, he would have been told: get rid of it.

The whole notion of Tibetan magic was: creation and destruction.

Through long-term grounding in this practice, the student would eventually come to see, first-hand, that he could invent anything and also dispense with it. Now we’re talking about power.

Not the inconsequential static of “positive and negative thoughts.” Not the little amateur radio station. Instead, the Niagara, initiated by the student and gotten rid of by the student.

“You’re in love with the idea of a beneficent universe that delivers all good things? All right, create that universe with all the energy you can muster. Spend months creating it. And then, when you’re quite sure you’ve got that marvelous invention, and it’s going to hand down to you everything you want, get rid of your invention. You see? You’re the artist of reality. You invent it. You can invent whatever you want, and you can destroy it, too. You’re the painter with an infinite canvas. You can fill it up with anything you want—and you can also paint over it and erase it out of existence. And there’s no need to feel sad about it, because you KNOW you can create endlessly. You’re living in a sea of abundance, not because the universe is mandating it, not because any entity or force or field or personage is mandating it or allowing it, but because YOU are the beginning and end of the abundance.”

The Tibetans weren’t fooling around. They weren’t taking a stroll through a mall. They weren’t pining over some fervently wished for relationship that never was. They weren’t cooking up some little religion with rainbows and marshmallows. They weren’t a terminally sentimental culture. They weren’t living and dying by dreams of abject hope. They weren’t inventing some good guy at the center of universe who comes down the chimney every night to deliver presents.

For that twisted version of the truth to flourish, there had to be a culture that was seeming to produce a consumer paradise. A place where every toy and machine and frizzle and frazzle on shelves of plenty were within arm’s reach—and still the people were unhappy. Then, the people would imagine that a higher St. Nick was available by merely “thinking good thoughts.” Then, people would believe this St. Nick was “giving them permission” to be happy.

Re the law of attraction, those early Tibetans would say: “Are you really worried about thinking a negative thought? All right, take one of those negative thoughts and invent it sky-high. Go to the quarry and cut out a two-ton block of granite and have some horses drag it back home and spend a few months engraving that negative thought on the stone and put lights on it and hold a week-long boggling celebration—and then blow up the stone. Do this whole process many times as you need to, until you realize you can invent anything and then get rid of it. Until you realize you’re an artist of reality and you’re infinitely more powerful than some weak sister of a ‘negative thought’.

An artist of reality puts together a vision of something he deeply, deeply, deeply desires, and then he strides out and brings it into being in the world. Because he wants to. Because he’ll walk through whatever he has to walk through to bring it to fruition. And that’s “the law of attraction.” It’s not a law and it isn’t attraction. It’s art. It’s creation. It’s invention. Nothing is “allowing it to happen.”

The individual, as an artist of reality, can go anywhere and access anything: he can tap into fields of data, oceans of being, other people’s minds, this consciousness and that consciousness, this role and that role; he can merge and un-merge—or he can do none of that. He can invent power out of nothing. He can, as artists have since the dawn of time, experience the joy and ecstasy of bringing to life his greatest dreams. He can invent and choose those dreams. And he can also, if he wants to, put all that on the shelf, and just walk down the street in the rain and hold a newspaper over his head and hail a cab and ride to a restaurant and have a drink and eat a meal with a friend and talk about the horse who won the fifth race at Del Mar.

And just in case you think I’m excluding all the “necessary work” that needs to be done to make this world a better place, a client I worked with, some years ago, told me: “I just woke up to my dream. I’m going to take down [a major evil corporation].” There was joy in his eyes, like a man on a high cliff looking out to sea contemplating glorious unknown lands. He is making progress, real progress. I wouldn’t want to be that corporation.

What I’m describing in this article is an open path. Major steps on that path are embodied in my three Matrix collections, because I’m not only interested in characterizing the journey, but also taking it.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

I think that in doing a critique, it’s always important to ask oneself if one is clearly understanding concepts – as understood by those who use them. Here you are not. You are taking your own meanings and assuming that they are definitive. Here’s a more accurate view of the meanings of those terms to those who use them:

– Corralling and directing one’s thoughts is not a passive activity.
– The universe is not an outside force. It is the sum total of all that is. The source from which the all including oneself is constantly being emerged. The spiritual realm, source, creation – whatever term wants to use.

And what most of those people are doing is exactly what you advocate in this and other posts. You’re getting tangled in terminologies.

You, and they, are stating – each in your own way::

“Each individual is a unique, free, incredibly powerful being couched within an infinite source and is able to create their own unique wondrous realities as expressions of themselves.”

Are some concepts and meanings more definitive and authoritative than others? Language is just a loose agreement on convention. Each word can be used in a variety of ways. A word like “universe” can easily mean an outside force, if the writer attributes to it certain powers and properties. Like knowing what you want, or what you should want. Like being emergent, or being a source of power. When a writer describes the universe in that way, then he is really portraying an omniscient being more powerful than the individual. There is no evidence that “everything that exists” has a collective or separate consciousness of its own. But since I experience consciousness myself individually, it’s better to go on the assumption the I have the creative power that goes along with consciousness, without my having to go get it or tap into some other source. You are of course free to choose otherwise. There is no final arbiter here – just our own subjective experience.

Simply put, the ‘Law of Attraction’ is the dual counterpart of the ‘Law of Rejection’. Those who believe in the existence of only one segment of a dualistic thought structure deceive themselves, and those who promote it are definitely crooks. More than any belief, this fake law perpetuates the myth of separation, the superstitious lie according to which you can set ‘good’ thoughts, people or events apart from ‘evil’ ones, without suffering the consequences. Since exactly the opposite is true, we must expose the ‘Law of attraction’ as bogus at every occasion.

Although…I believe, if by “duel counterpart” you mean opposite or antonym, repel or repulse would be more accurate than reject.

at·tract
əˈtrakt/
verb
verb: attract; 3rd person present: attracts; past tense: attracted; past participle: attracted; gerund or present participle: attracting
cause to come to a place or participate in a venture by offering something of interest, favorable conditions, or opportunities.
“a campaign to attract more visitors to West Virginia”
evoke (a specified reaction).
“I did not want to attract attention”
cause (someone) to have a liking for or interest in something.
“I was attracted to the idea of working for a ballet company”
synonyms: entice, allure, lure, tempt, charm, win over, woo, engage, enthrall, enchant, entrance, captivate, beguile, bewitch, seduce
“he was attracted by her smile”
antonyms: repel
cause (someone) to have a sexual or romantic interest in someone.
“it was her beauty that attracted him”
exert a force on (an object) that is directed toward the source of the force.
“the negatively charged ions attract particles of dust”
synonyms: draw, pull; magnetize
“positive ions are attracted to the negatively charged terminal”
antonyms: repel
Origin

late Middle English: from Latin attract- ‘drawn near,’ from the verb attrahere, from ad- ‘to’ + trahere ‘draw.’
Translate attract to
Use over time for: attract

Like anyone else, I have studied the Law of Attraction when it came out.

But, the way I understood it, was nothing like Jon, wrote.

In my own little head (lol), I figured out that “Attraction”, was more less like how telepathy works, which would explain things like simultaneous inventions in different parts of the world, for instance.

In other words: Your thoughts travel through some electrical waves and reach like minded people.

You’re right, why calling your head little. sure it’s telepathy. But in an unspoken way. Because words are too little to explain that realm–unless you are a poet.

unconscious is the key to rule the so called “law of attraction”
and this splits in two: either you feel a desire so huge that can erase all your sub-conscious to it’s tiniest bit to re-create or you can go get yourself a “hypnotist” or shrink, or someone who can alter your sub. Best way and easiest way is to desire something huge, imagine something huge, crazy-like, or imagination as Jon puts it. Creating your own hypnosis. Why depend on someone else? everyone can create their own, deepest selves without therapist. Trial&error is the key.

Another great article, Jon, and, surprisingly, at last I understand what is driving you and ancient Tibetan (perhaps, dare I say, Vedic-Aryan) methods. In summary, though, all people of the modern age feeding off the mainstream struggle with facing truths. Reality, we both know, is spectral from negative to positive and back to negative again.

The Tibetans, by my appraisal of your version, are saying that first you must apply without limit and then you must have the discipline to dismiss the finished article. Destruction isn’t necessary when your state of vanity is neither improved nor defeated by the consequence of loss. In fact, and though you don’t refer to it specifically, the journey and “lessons learned” are the prerequisite. As a concert standard classical pianist, I care nothing about past performances except as references for ideas on possible “improvement”, expansion of form and so on.

There is a natural limiter. Whilst our present science pretends to understand DNA, it does not. Spectral interconnectivity is the key to existence and that is why complete DNA activation affords God-like qualities. As mere mortals, we must find our imaginations sufficient.

I think he is talking about Bonpo shaman, they are more Mongolian than vedic-arayan. I’m sure there is influence.
They were training their minds since birth, add to that fact, they were drinking vast amount of reindeer urine. They could conjure up all kinds of wonderful things.
Do you know the story of Milarepa; the green bodhisattva? He was a bonpo wizard.

“The Tibetans, by my appraisal of your version, are saying that first you must apply without limit and then you must have the discipline to dismiss the finished article. ”
– The Ozmander

I think its something about believing in your own bullshit.
I think we all have our vision of a god or a diety. Witnessing all seven billion of them materilized through imagination here on our little planet would be…I am still searching for a word to describe that.
I think there is something to be said about that old adage Oz; “If you ever meet the Buddha on the road, kill him please.”

Bodhi….what? I probably know of him, but grey matter’s playin’ after too much Christmas pie.

Did you know that Mongolia simply means “great” and years ago there weren’t no bloody Chinese there (er nothing agin’ my Asiian friends). What I mean I is they didn’t speak the lingo & “Vedism” was pretty much is…until that long haired Oriental, Zoroaster, came along and mucked things up.

On a more serious note, I think “believing the bullshit” is the antipathy of what Jon & the Tibetans were about. Believing in objective goals, yes….shoot for the stars, but always be mindful of self-aggrandizement. The best way to avoid narcissism is to dismiss your finest achievements.

The irony is: as good as one thinks one is, when meek, improvement is limitless…..!

Antipathy…oh there no dislike with what Jon has said…i meant something else.
When one studies the Bonpo, their mental practices often involved the ingestion of DMT, and what they manifest in that space they created or travel to, followed them back from that alternate realm, dimensions other universes that they travelled.
These adepts had extrememly powerful minds. To manifest something of a companion, diety, genii, or powerful spirit to aid one was not uncalled for at y
that time…believing and imaginaing in it so intensely occupies the mental construct that they create, quite like McKennas machine elves if you like.
The secret is in sustaining the thought for a prolonged period of time, the average modern human is far too distracted to unfocused for that kind of imagination. We are actually very stupid compared to a human of a thousand years ago. Too many toxins not enough nutrition, the natural structure of drinking water is gone, too much dangerous radiation getting through, and everyone has forgotten how to heal themselves. Many have very soft minds. Most don’t even know how their bodies work. The genius of the ancient polymath enabled a rounded and more developed knowledge both two and three dimensionally. Fouth and fifth dimensional knowledge was an aid to that genius. I talking about humans with keen five senses.
Now with modern genius limited to a specialty, art, music, mathematics etc. Leonardo Da Vinci was a trully profound thinker. They don’t make them like that anymore. And it is extremely rare for anyone to reach for such great height even if they understand it is there.
You have a point; self-aggrandizing is the kiss of death but meek seems a little too weak.

Ah, what you are talking about is something entirely different. I sort of touch on it in my latest Exopolitician post “the cosmic script symbol which equates to the transcendental inter-dimensional traveller”.

This is an impossibility for humans. Our gene structure is too low vibrational, but “transcendentalism” might go some way to bridging the gap. The Gnostics had exercises to fuse with nature that defied what we understand as “reality”.

Someone with passion for something who acts out on it is more likely to achieve success than one who doesn’t. But that isn’t the LOA. It’s just an increase in probability. However, there are no shortages of people with similar passions who act on them and get nowhere. Did you ever watch the tryouts for one of those God awful singing shows? There you have people with passion, drive, and most important, BELIEF in what they are doing. And most of them get nowhere. Perhaps they’d be better off asking the universe for wisdom instead of a recording contract.

Like attracting like: I think it does work with relationships. And I think there’s something to be said for trying to weed out self-defeating thoughts. But this is a job one would be better off entrusting to a good therapist rather than a charlatan such as Abraham-Hicks. New Age thought is a complete waste of time.